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Comment by frossie | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps because she is too busy thinking "I have never been at the receiving end of such a patronising explanation before?"

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A conversation with my wife would probably go like this:

Wife: Who is "Roy Fielding"?

Me: Some guy. He’s smart.

Wife: Oh? What did he do?

Me: He helped write the first web servers and then did a ton of research explaining why the web works the way it does. His name is on the specification for the protocol that is used to get pages from servers to your browser.

Wife: Oh, sorry, I thought he was in that movie with Jennifer Aniston.

Me: The web is pretty amazing really. And the funny thing is that it’s all very undervalued. The protocol I was talking about, HTTP, it’s capable of all sorts of neat stuff that people ignore for some reason.

Wife: Can you please stop it. I've been trying to catch the finale of ER for the longest time.

Me: But HTTP is really simple to explain.

Wife: Some other time honey, not now.

Poor you.

It'd be similar with me, except she wouldn't say "Some other time honey" because she frankly wouldn't be interested one jot in something like how the Web works.

Actually, I suspect it'd end with a different line 3: "So what do you want for dinner?" or "When are you going to put up the shelves?" LOL.

W: Who is Roy Fielding M: Some smart guy W: So is he going to help you fix the shed?

Actually, you've nailed it.

If she's not a technical person, that's on about the right level. It's probably done up a little for the sake of making it slightly more interesting to read, but I could imagine a conversation between a very technical person and somebody who knows next to nothing going very much along those lines. And even if it is a little oversimplified, it gets the point across very well.

I realise it's off-topic (and I am somewhat cranky), but it's not the level of the explanation that is the problem - it's the way it seems to be addressed to a 7 year old ("He's smart!", "It's amazing").

As an adult, I personally would prefer if you explained something to me and let me be the judge of how smart and amazing everybody is.

But if you clearly don't have the domain knowledge required to make those judgements it really can be helpful.

I don't know anything about wine, and I really appreciate being told, "this is made my ____, they are super famous for ____".

then I can judge if I like it or not, regardless of how famous/old it is.

I also really like hearing other people's opinions and interacting with their excitement over "their thing" so ... to each their own I suppose.

He's smart! and It's amazing is just how Ryan talks. He's extremely energetic and really fun to have technical discussions with because of it.

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